E-Stalking

I had some trouble getting to sleep last night. I surfed. I found this interesting advice column.

The person who wrote in to the column is 28. Her boyfriend, 25, went to Indonesia for his job and then dumped her with an email. Cowardly and Low Class. The woman who wrote in confessed that she still had her ex’s gmail password and that she had been reading his email for two months.

That didn’t get me. What got me was the large number of women commenting on the column who confessed, with impunity, that they had done the same thing. Hello? Ethics anyone? Do the words “stalking”, “illegal”, or “scummy” pop into anyone’s heads? I’m amazed.

If you have to share your password with somebody, change it afterwards.

BTW, Google prints out where your gmail account was last accessed from at the bottom center of your gmail page.

7 thoughts on “E-Stalking”

FWIW, I’ve encountered some men who do the same thing. More than one female friend has told me they discovered that their boyfriends or ex boyfriends had hacked their email. Generally a password had never been shared, but the ex managed to guess the password. In one extreme case he sent her a virus that captured all her passwords for him. So it is not just women, but it’s scary and wrong.

Even if an ex is an IT person I would imagine guessing or cracking a password would be a lot of work. The fact that a person is sitting there for the amount of time to do it should be a big warning sign to them that they are acting in a sick and unethical way. Yeesh, I think I will go change my passwords…AGAIN! 🙂

Was this on a windows box? I’ve never seen a keystroke logger before. I’m guessing they aren’t listed in the START menu or come with desktop icons. How did you find it, by going to ADD/REMOVE programs ?

Not a program, it was a device attached to my cable. Coincidentally we had just had a seminar at the bank on recognizing such things. After that I ran something called Identity Patrol to find spyware but it didn’t find anything… it was then time for a new laptop. And a locked desk. And changed locks.

After your last comment I went and read an article about key stroke loggers. I learned that they are hardware loggers, like the one your ex used. Not very smart as they are far more visible than the software.

Unfortunately, I learned that key stroke logger software is very easy to write, very easy to hide and already exist for all of the major platforms.

Welcome to Orwell land. I always thought it would be a job that would make me learn more about these things not fucked up e-stalking exs.